Early American Women Authors

1.) What do the poems of Anne Bradstreet, the "Narrative" of Mary Rowlandson, the Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight, and the letters of Abigail Adams reveal about the fears, anxieties, and accommodations that comprised ordinary life for women in Early American society?

2.) Consider aspects of Mary Rowlandson's experiences that bear particular attention because she is a woman. Note how she is treated because she is female. What can one assume about how she was treated in her own society? Note what was expected of her in Indian society. Comment on her reaction to the treatment of Indian women in Indian society, and note the Indian women's reactions to her.

3.) Does anything in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley indicate that the author was a woman? Could her poetry have been written just as easily by a man? Compare her poetry, in this regard, to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet.

4.) Sarah Kemble Knight engaged in a variety of enterprises to support her family. Her journey is evidence of her independence and self-reliance in thought and action. How much is she like the women that appear in works by Benjamin Franklin? What might have been her reaction to Franklin's primer for success, The Way to Wealth?

5.) Do Abigail Adams' letters and Bradstreet's poems reveal any major differences between the life of an 18th-century American woman adn that of a 17th-century woman? Did the religious, political, and social currents of the Age of Reason effect a life different for the woman of the 1700s than that of the Puritan woman of the 1600s? Was there a revolution in women's lives in the Age of Revolution? Did Deism and its concern with social betterment and its idea of progress and Locke's belief in social contracts and natural rights change women's lives?

Source: Dr. Robert Houston (retired), English Department, Mankato State University (1990).